Shelving Quotes & Sayings

I'm not sure about prizes. I don't know how far you can seriously raise public consciousness about poetry. Having a 'National Poetry Day,' like a 'No Smoking Day,' is just shelving the problem. Things which should by rights be every day are not best served by these things. — John Fuller

I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room. — Reif Larsen

Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing
in my collection and others
in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music
vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison
room as brain
is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look. — Jonathan Lethem

Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see the paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the grey, the every-coloured books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen. With — Markus Zusak

I thought I appreciated books, but this was an alter to the book gods. It was hard not to be impressed. I didn't know what had the most impact: the rosewood shelving, the rolling library ladders, the mezzanine floor with the ornate spiral wrought-iron staircases at each end, the carved moldings, the scent of well-loved books, or the silky Aubusson rugs in a soft faded palette of rose, sage and aqua. — Victoria Abbott

Shelving hard decisions is the least ethical course. — Adrian Cadbury

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world. — Helen Vendler

PAPER TOWERS
The library was on the second floor of the House, not far from my room. It had two floors - the first held the majority of the books and a balcony wrapped in a wrought-iron railing held another set. It was a cavalcade of tomes, all in immaculate rows, and with study carrels and tables thrown in for good measure. It was my home away from home(away from home.
I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust - the perfumes of knowledge. The library was empty of patrons as far as I could tell, but I could hear the rhythmic squeal of a library cart somewhere in the rows. I followed them down until I found the dark-haired vampire shelving books with mechanical precision. I knew him only as "the librarian." He was a fount of information, and he had a penchant for leaving books outside my door. — Chloe Neill

It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well. — Deborah Meyler

She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen.
With wonder, she smiled.
That such a room existed! — Markus Zusak

Make no mistake, this woman had a heart. She had a bigger one than people would think. There was a lot in it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. Remember that she was the woman with the instrument strapped to her body in the long, moon-slit night. She was a Jew feeder without a question in the world on a man's first night in Molching. And she was an arm reacher, deep into a mattress, to deliver a sketchbook to a teenage girl. — Markus Zusak

Subject: You're totally picturing me naked right now
Missy,
So how about you and I head up to the stacks to do some "shelving"? — Chelsea M. Cameron

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university. — John Jakes

Open shelving may be fashionable, but a closed cabinet door is the best way to stop grease and dust collecting in the first place. — Sheherazade Goldsmith

Make no mistake, the woman had a heart. She had a bigger one that people would think. There was a lot in it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. Remember that she was the woman with the instrument strapped to her body in the long, moon-slit night. — Markus Zusak

Make no mistake, the woman (Rosa) had a heart. She had a bigger one than people would think. There was a lot in it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. — Marcus Zusak

Twas a cold Yuletide evening, and I wandered the stacks, shelving multiple titles that the patrons brought back. We toiled overtime at our library here, 'cause the powers that be cut our staffing this year. — David Davis

The interior was dim like a cave. The ceiling, pressed tin, was stalactited with hooks from the days when the shopkeeper would hang it with buckets, watering cans, coils of rope and paired boots. Refrigerator cases lined a side wall, shallow crates of withered fruit and vegetables the back, and in the vast middle ground were aisles of rickety shelving, stacked with anything from tinned peaches to tampons. The sole cash register was adjacent to the entrance, next to ranks of daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines and a little bookcase thumbtacked with a sign, Library. If you were a farmer in need of an axe or some some sheep dip you headed for the far back corner. If you wanted to buy a stamp, you headed a couple of paces past the library. — Garry Disher

But there was something different about Flynn, and it wasn't just the way he was looking at her. His grip tightened on her wrist
not painfully, but possessively. His other arm went up as he leaned against the shelving, effectively boxing her in with his body without making any further contact.
To her horror, she felt herself go warm and liquid in places she shouldn't. "Let go of me." Evie whispered.
His eyes were green. A bright mind-blowing green. And they were staring into hers intently, daring her to lean in closer, to taste those sinful lips ... — M.A. Grant

Knowledge equals power ...
The string was important. After a while the Librarian stopped. He concentrated all his powers of librarianship.
Power equals energy ...
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
Energy equals matter ...
He swung into an avenue of shelving that was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour.
Matter equals mass.
And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-space.
So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you're setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string. — Terry Pratchett

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse. — Paul Acampora

I don't have too many books, I have too little shelving. — Lauren DeStefano

What is genre?...Just recently Teresa Nielsen Hayden told me it wasn't actually telling you what to look at, where to go. It was telling you what aisles not to bother going down. Which I thought was astonishingly perceptive. There are too many books out there... That's the simplicity of book shelving in bookstores. It tells you what not to read. — Neil Gaiman

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts - manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story. — Mark Twain

No more looking at a wall and pretending it's a mirror. No more shelving fiction in the non-fiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it. — David Levithan